Jan Iserle

“Those were people that I didn’t know were in the resistance. By my desk, I had Mr Pištora, who was later executed. One time, Pištora sat by the window, which he had left slightly open, and I told him we’d both catch a cold, but he said that no, he was hot. He lived across the road, on the first floor of Mrs Bubeníčková’s house, and he was waiting for when they would come for him, to run away. They didn’t come for him that time, but they got him another time, I don’t know where.”

“Everyone was waiting in the corridor and I was expected in the operating room; I came there, she was dressed in casuals, with a kind of ruffled blouse, doing a cornea transplant, and she said for me to wait, that she’d finish it. She had her instruments in an enamel pot. And that is cutting-edge surgery, and she did it brilliantly. I attended other operations there as well, for instance, they had the son of one sultan there, with a squint, and she cut all of his muscles, and he couldn’t move the eye any more. I voiced my surprise, and Roza told me that the only one higher than her was God. Well, the squint was gone, he couldn’t move the eye. The nurses went through the whole place, the things they saw – say, they gave us torn clothes because they didn’t wear white. I had torn trousers, like the sort that are fashionable now. There was a large puddle on the floor, so I asked if something had burst somewhere, but they told me that was piss from blocked urinals.”

“Suddenly at noon, it was hot, we heard the sirens, saw smoke, so we jumped on our bikes and rode to Pardubice. We were stopped by soldiers, Germans, in the square by the city hall; they took our bikes and stuffed us into a car, which was full of other people they’d rounded up, and they took us to the Fantovka. They dropped us off at Linhart’s shop and drove on; I escaped to take some photos, the second bomb had dropped next to Macan Street, and it was blown all th way from the station to the Fantovka; the sugar refinery had been bombed out of existence. I had a camera, so I took some photos and legged it back again, because back then they said that bombs can explode up to an hour later. They stopped me again, to get me to help clear it up, but there whole beams and rafters collapsed there; the Germans stood by, they wanted us to pull them out. I didn’t, but they heard people – that there were people calling out from under the rubble. They called and called, we cleared what we could, but there’s not much you can do with your bare hands, bricks, a piece of some beam. And then it stopped, and all of them down below were dead, thirty-five people died there back then. And if we had just broken through from the cellar of the neighbouring house, which was one thin wall, they would’ve been saved.”

“I would fill in employment record books when at the hospital’s insurance company during the war, and I got a heads up, I think from Doctor Jírek, to watch out and not to give anyone a blank book. Especially if some woman came along and promised me the moon, not to give in. I wondered, what is he talking about? Just a few days later, a certain Komínková came along from Svítkov, the daughter of a Czechoslova gendarme, and she went at me – and she was all done up with some massive cleavage, and she kept at me, saying her dad had lost his Arbeitsbuch [employment record book] and that he would fill it all in himself, just please to give her one, that I had a heap of them there, and she promised to bring me goodness knows what. So I told her I couldn’t give her anything, that it was all precisely counted and I mustn’t lose any. She wanted to buy it. The Germans were searching for where Valčík of Veselka had gotten his book from. She had been planted by the Germans, and her sister also tried it some time later.”

“And suddenly those Germans came up, we weren’t friends with them much, or at all in fact, and they said they had to tell us something. Luckily, I was an expert in German because my parents had sent me on two exchange trips to Rumburk to learn German, I spent a month in a German family each time. And the sayd: ‘Pack it up quick and get out of here!’ I reckoned they were bluffing, that they wanted to get rid of us, probably to snatch our flat. But they kept saying we should go, go quickly. We later heard that the Germans were rounding up university students, they nabbed the whole of the Hlávka Student Hall and took them to Oranienburg. These Germans saved us, because people later said: ‘The moment you left, the Germans drove up, the SS, they were looking for you.’”